I was not going to write anything about the non-event of Hammond’s Spring statement, in part because I confess I am tired of writing about the Conservative party’s hopeless macroeconomic policy. It is like being forced to second mark all the fails from a first year economics exam.

The UK has been living through the most feeble and protracted economic recovery in modern British history, leaving people on course to be almost £9,000 worse off on average by 2022-23 relative to the pre-crisis trend, according to calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The bonanza, in the end, failed to materialise. There had been a fair amount of talk before the Spring Statement that Philip Hammond would be in a position to unveil a new dawn for our beleaguered public finances.

By 2050 the world economy will be back to the sort of balance that it was in around 1820, before the Industrial Revolution really got going. The order will be China, the US, India, Japan, and Germany – with the UK after that

The UK now has a surplus on the government’s current budget. George Osborne tweeted “We got there in the end — a remarkable national effort. Thank you.” This has been a remarkable period in UK macroeconomic history, but not in the way Osborne thinks.